


The First Cut is the Deepest

by Corycides



Series: Hands On [4]
Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-14
Updated: 2013-04-14
Packaged: 2017-12-08 13:07:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/761653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corycides/pseuds/Corycides
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rachel never told Monroe what he wanted to know, but sometimes she thinks he won anyhow</p>
            </blockquote>





	The First Cut is the Deepest

There was blood on her hands. It was wet and slick and hot.

'Go wash,' Aaron said. His voice was shaking, and his fingers, but he looked at her like she was the one breaking. 'I'll make camp. We should be safe here.'

She didn't let him see her roll her eyes as she grabbed her stuff and went down to the lake, stripping down to her skin on the shore. Her feet were raw and blistered – it had been a long time since she'd walked so far, since she'd walked anywhere – and there was a darkening blue bruise that ran from her hip to her knee.

Habit registered the injuries without accepting them. She didn't  _look_ at them to tally up the scars and stains, the wounds old and new; she didn't  _feel_ them on some level. The pain was real, but it was detached. It didn't seem to belong to her, but then her body didn't either.

She supposed it did now.

Blood ribboned from her feet as she waded into the still, vaguely green water. Standing knee deep she looked down at herself, fingers touching herself with the tentative care of a new lover. The curve of her breast, the cold-tight jut of her nipple, the faint curve of her belly. A tickle of sensation shivered through her. Her fingertips found the surgical slice of the Caesarean between her hipbones and the flat, red slick of an M shaped scar tissue on her inner thigh.

She went cold, switch flicked.

What would Miles think if he saw her naked now? Would he still look at with those soft, brown eyes that never really saw  _her?_ Probably. He'd see it as one more failure, one more 'brave, broken Rachel' moment. It would make him want to fix her.

She found a rock and sat down, water rising to lift her breasts and float the tangled ends of her hair. Her fingers traced the M on her thigh, damaged nerve endings twitching electricity down to her toes. It had taken Strausser a hour to get that right, steady hands slicing worms of skin and fat from her thigh and rubbing soft red powder into the oozing wound.

Afterwards he'd given her a beautiful red dress and she'd gone to dinner with Monroe, leaning on his arm (it wasn't like she had a choice, her leg felt pulverised) and smiling pleasantly at the various dignitaries and officers who'd come to the bend the knee to the President of the Republic.

He'd asked to see it later – he always  _asked_ , always made it  _her_ choice – and told her it was a sign of how important to the Republic she was. His lips had burned like acid when he kissed the raw flesh and then felt like ice between her thighs. It was a sign of how important she was to him, he told her.

She'd...almost believed it. It would have been easier to believe it, made sense of everything.

'Tell me what Ben was working on?' he asked.

God help them all, if Monroe wasn't such a chauvinist dick she'd have probably told him everything. It was only the old pettiness that made her refuse letters addressed to 'Dr and Mrs Matheson' that made her hold her tongue that night.

She slid her hand between her thighs – ignoring the pragmatic little voice that said 'this doesn't seem hygienic' – and tried to remember what it was like before.

Ben had made love like he had a 'to do' list: lips, breasts, twiddle between her thighs and down to business. She'd loved him, though, that changed everything. She braced one hand behind her on the algae-slick rock, lifting her knee and touching herself with awkward, uncertain fingers and tried to remember what it had felt like.

Like her blood was fizzing under her skin, all pleasure and delight and pillow talk about molecular self-assembly. He was an accomplished, brilliant man and he didn't care that she was even smarter than him.

She could remember the feeling, but it was like it was behind glass. She couldn't feel it, couldn't feel anything.

The last time she'd felt anything...anything that was normal...was with Miles. Normal didn't mean right, but she had wanted him. It had been raw and desperate and full of this mad faith that they could fix each other and everything else. She'd thought forgiveness from just one person would be enough.

It wasn't, it couldn't be, but she had thought that maybe he could still fix her. That first time she saw him, with Strausser dead and freedom just  _there_ , she'd felt anger and love and....real. She'd felt real, but she wasn't.

She hadn't wanted Miles. It had been Strausser dead under her, his blood hot and sticky on her fingers, that had flushed warmth through her skin. Monroe had broken her after all; he'd won.

Her fingers were starting to ache. She gave up and finished scrubbing herself clean, wading out of the lake and pulled her clothes back on. Aaron had the fire started when she got back and he smiled at her.

'Feeling better?'

She gave him a tired, pleat of a smile and sat down, holding her fingers out to the fire. 'Clean, anyhow.'

That was a lie. She hadn't felt clean in a long time.

 


End file.
